Post-Cold War military doctrine, as stated in the 1993 "Bottom-Up
Review" and the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review, requires that the
United States be prepared to fight two regional conflicts, almost
simultaneously, with little or no warning and little or no help from
our allies. Some commentators point out that we are uncomfortably
close to testing the worth of these plans. A brief examination
suggests that we have already progressed far beyond fighting two
large-scale wars.

Our attention is presently fixated on Iraq, where a force of roughly
90,000 troops is being supplemented by another 100,000 or so in the
next weeks and months. Some critics of the war effort and plans point
out that most of those additional troops were intended for the
occupation of Iraq after defeat of the Hussein regime. Now it seems
that the Iraqi citizens are unable to show their preferences for rule
at the point of America guns over rule at the point of Iraqi guns,
and as a result the occupation forces may see considerable combat.
Whatever the outcome, the fact that plans called for an occupation
force as large or larger than the initial invasion force illustrates
a useful rule of thumb for any overseas deployment. If a given number
of soldiers are required for the deployment, military planners will
require a mobilization three times that size. Roughly speaking,
one-third will be organizing for deployment, one-third will be
deployed, and one-third will be de-mobilizing after returning home.

Iraq and its occupation are far from our only challenge, and American
armed forces were substantially reduced during the Clinton terms.
There is active combat in Afghanistan, as shown by recent attacks
staged by 1,000 American troops and associated American casualties.
Iran and Syria are potential new fronts in the invasion of Iraq, and
of course North Korea and Pakistan are now demonstrating the utility
of small, impoverished countries developing nuclear weapons. Curious
as to how many troops we have available to fight the growing number
of conflicts, I downloaded the latest publicly available report on US
troop strengths. You can get your own copy at [
pdf link]

The report breaks down active duty military personnel by country and
service as of December 31, 2001. At that time, there were a total of
about 1.4 million active duty men and women in the US Armed Forces.

Invasion and Occupation of Iraq:

MSNBC reports on March 27, 2003 that "Pentagon officials estimate
there are 270,000 U.S. troops in the gulf region and 90,000 coalition
troops inside Iraq." Keep in mind that if we need 100,000 troops as
an occupation force, it will tie up 300,000 total. If the Iraqis
prove as difficult and elusive as Al Queda and the impoverished and
ignorant Taliban, which are still forcing us to send out battle
groups 1,000 strong over 18 months after we started invading
Afghanistan, then 100,000 may not be nearly enough.

Invasion and Occupation of Afghanistan:

Current troop levels in Afghanistan are not widely reported. MSNBC
estimates about 9,000 US troops deployed in early 2003, engaged in
the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The occupation of the Balkans:

Many empires have broken their teeth on this mountainous region. As
of Dec. 31, 2001 we had over 8,300 troops stationed in Bosnia,
Herzegovina, and Serbia. Our now-alienated allies constitute the bulk
of this particular occupation force, with some 40,000 troops
stationed in the region.

The occupation of Kuwait:

Remember the first Gulf War? The one were we defended the Kuwaiti
dictator's right to slant-drill into Iraqi oil fields? We still had
4,300 troops there in Dec. 2001, though of course now we have many
more. It seems quite likely that those oil fields will need
substantial protection for many years, if not many decades.

The occupation of Saudi Arabia:

The Saudis learned the hard way that it is much easier to invite the
US military in than it is to ask them to leave. We had 5,300 troops
in the home of 15 of the 19 hijackers. There are probably many more
now, but even the 5,300 was enough to motivate Osama bin Laden to
recruit his fellow countrymen and mount his attacks.

The occupation of South Korea:

There were 32,972 US troops in Korea, just short of five decades
after the cease-fire. Given North Korea's ambitions and our
name-calling, high-handed diplomacy, you can expect those numbers to
go up, very fast and very soon.

The occupation of Japan:

36,691 troops almost 60 years after an unconditional surrender. A
fair accounting would include the 12,500 afloat in the region, and
with North Korea acting like a sovereign nation, there's little
reason to believe that this number will go down. All told, we had
some 90,822 armed forces personnel in the East Asia and Pacific
region. The necessity of a force this large half a century after the
end of hostilities does not give much hope for our early
disengagement from Iraq (or Afghanistan, or Kuwait, or...)

The occupation of Germany:

71,434 troops on Dec. 31, 2001. They must be a troublesome people,
especially compared to the French, where we find a force of 70 to be
sufficient.

The occupation of Italy:

Italy hosted 11,854 US troops. Maybe there are benefits to belonging
to an "axis."

Well, the Brits are still friends of the fedgov, at least until Tony
Blair has to face the music back home, so it's probably not polite to
use the word occupation to describe a force of 11,361 heavily armed
Americans in the UK. Europe and the UK host a grand total of 118,149
troops, with nearly 5,000 afloat.

One interesting point is the low US force levels in Sub-Saharan
Africa: 259 troops for the entire region. Perhaps they need to form
an axis.

Occupations are far from the only thing that armed forces do, they
are just tremendously expensive and logistically demanding. If one
applies the 3x rule (one mobilizing, one deployed, one demobilizing)
we need a force of some 600,000 just to sustain the older occupation
forces. Adding about 3x 150,000 for the occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan, we're going to need to keep well over a million men and
women dedicated to overseas commitments for the foreseeable future.
With a total military population of 1.4 million in 2001, it may be
that we're getting spread a little thin. Of course, we can (and
already have) called up Reserve troops, but when history shows that
we don't leave our conquered foes for 50 years or more after the end
of hostilities, clearly we will need still more men and women in
uniform to meet these ever-growing obligations.

Other wars:

The War on Iraq is far from our only war. Most of the occupations
have the benefit of relatively few killed in action, prisoners of
war, and casualties, but there are plenty of active combat zones at
home and abroad.

The War on Terrorism:

A clever construct with an undefined enemy and no definition of
victory that will give license for the destruction of civil
liberties, increased taxation, and untold damage to the domestic and
global economy for decades to come. Already the "security" gauntlet
deployed at US airports keeps flyers away in large number,
bankrupting pretty much all the airlines and damaging business and
free trade. Some commentators have pointed out that adding 2-hour
delays at airports means that we do more economic damage every few
weeks than the attacks of September 11.

In the near future we can anticipate attacks on the other "Axis of
Evil" members. We already have Iran in a nice pincer, if only we can
hold onto Iraq and Afghanistan. Then comes North Korea, and after
that no one knows. On the home front, we've detained some thousands,
but since they are "illegal combatants" we don't know who or where
they are. We do know that at least one US citizen has been
disappeared: taken on US soil, thrown in a brig, and denied access to
lawyer or courts. More are sure to follow, particularly after we
finish showing 1 billion Muslims what is planned for their future.

The War on Caucasians:

This war is the reason that the little old ladies at the airport get
wand-raped while the young Middle Eastern males walk on unmolested.
Sometimes called the War on Racial Profiling, but this is misleading
as it is perfectly acceptable to profile the white race. This war has
progressed quite a long way with very little attention. People have
been sentenced to jail for using racial epithets. We've seen white
drivers of white vans dragged from their vehicles at gunpoint and
handcuffed on the highway pavement during the DC sniper hysteria.
This occurred some weeks after detailed eyewitness reports were
collected by police describing two short-haired black men giving
high-fives to each other while driving slowly away from the first
sniper shooting in a beat-up dark sedan.[
link]

Casualties and prisoners are not tallied as far as I can tell. The
airlines are (perhaps deserving) casualties as their product is now
unfit for consumption by a free people. Quotas, set-asides, and other
economic and social damages are widespread but difficult to quantify.

The War on Drugs:

This war already involves many military assets, but the bigger effect
is the number of civilian casualties and prisoners of war. Casualties
are not tallied but certainly are several thousands or tens of
thousands each year, mostly from black market turf battles and the
associated collateral damages, plus consumer deaths from impure
goods. Unusual casualties like shooting down missionaries and their
infant children get more press, but the blood flows in American
streets every day. Corruption of law enforcement and the justice
system is endemic to the point that getting a fair trial by an
impartial jury in a drug case is effectively impossible.

The rule of law was an early casualty. California voters, who
apparently still believe the outdated propaganda that "if you don't
like the law, organize and vote to get it changed," provided a
recent, rather powerful demonstration. They organized and lobbied and
voted, but unelected fedgov agents and judges decided to ignore state
law and the explicit limits placed on them by the federal
constitution. The feds won't acknowledge legalizing medical cannabis
production and distribution nor the constitutionally protected right
of the state and citizens to do so. (See "War on Education" to
understand why the citizens of California have not revolted.)

Civil liberties are another casualty, as the ninth and tenth
amendments clearly reserve the power to judge questions of what
substances a free people can ingest to themselves or at worst their
state legislatures. The fourth amendment has been completely
destroyed by corrupt judges crafting "drug war exceptions" to the
unambiguous language of the highest law of the land.

In addition to the tens of thousands killed in action and the
wholesale destruction of inner cities there are presently about 1
million POWs in federal and state prisons and a larger number on
supervised parole. There have been about 6 million arrests for
cannabis possession alone since 1990.

The War on Firearms:

Sometimes deliberately mis-identified as a War on Gun Violence. While
the victims of this particular war have essentially won the
historical and scholarly legal debate on the meaning of the Second
Amendment, the courts move very slowly when it suits them, and there
is no effective restraint against judges imposing their personal
views on the subject. The Supremes in particular seem unwilling to
accept a firearms rights case, so the carnage will continue for some
years to come at a minimum. Statistics on casualties and POWs are
hard to come by as the government does not distinguish a sentence for
armed robbery from one for a "technical gun law violation."
Successful victim disarmament organizations like the NRA continue to
press for additional federal prison sentences for prisoners of this
war. Certainly there are some thousands or tens of thousands of POWs,
some score of extra-judicial killings every year, and a fair
accounting would include the 3,000+ deaths of September 11, 2001, all
of which would have been prevented if only the law was respected and
airline passengers were not deprived of their constitutionally
guaranteed rights. Add in to that total the millions of murders,
rapes, assaults, and other violent personal and property crimes that
would have been prevented by well armed potential victims.

The War on Poverty:

This is another war defined in such a way that there can be no
victory and no definitive accounting of casualties and prisoners.
Casualties include the millions of children who grew up in
single-parent families as a result of welfare rules that penalized
two-parent cohabitation. This condition has well-established
correlation to diminished lifetime earnings and increased risk of
incarceration. Prisoners include the millions who have been taught
that dependency and helplessness are rewarded at least as well as
hard work.

The War on Education:

While rarely acknowledged in public, this war has been prosecuted
quite effectively since the advent of substantial federal involvement
in state and local educational decisions began some decades ago.
Casualties include the majority of today's adult American population
who were released into the world with inflated self esteem but a
grossly inadequate education and lack of ability for independent
thought, with a liberal dose of wildly inaccurate history, civics,
and philosophy mixed in. Our economy depends on technology and
services but most people are functionally innumerate and a growing
minority is functionally illiterate. POWs include the legions of
young males who must be drugged into submission plus the millions of
inner-city children sentenced to years in institutions that have long
ceased even pretending to prepare them for adult life.

The War on Private Property

This one has been progressing steadily for at least 50 years and some
trace its roots back to dawn of the 20th century. It goes far beyond
the attacks on control of our bodies being prosecuted under the war
on drugs, to include the product of our work and the very earth under
our feet. (Proposals to tax the rain falling from the skies are being
seriously debated in some locales.) The income tax takes away control
over the fruits of our labor and ensures that when we work harder to
improve our lot in life, the government will grow at least as fast,
and generally faster than our puny fortunes.

Zoning laws have made a mockery out of the concept of owning real
estate. Officials of the small fiefdom where I reside have informed
me on numerous occasions that I should think of myself as a "steward"
of the property rather than an owner. With my property taxes rising
over twice as fast as my income while a flood of new zoning
restrictions systematically destroys the value of my single largest
investment, the end is not difficult to predict. I'm told that the
oligarchy has decided that my class of property will become
"affordable housing." It seems that local snob-zoning laws have been
so effective at raising property values beyond the means of "the
wrong people" that some sacrificial parcels are required to evade
state and federal government anti-discrimination laws. About 10% of
the parcels in the fief have been singled out for systematic
destruction in value, this being cheaper (to the fief) than the
building of suitable slums. Destruction also avoids the loss of fief
control associated with new construction; if landowners were allowed
to subdivide or even create accessory apartments in the existing
stock the problem would be solved but the fief might lose some power.

Anti-discrimination laws, racial preferences and set-asides, and a
host of similar measures have destroyed the right of assembly, or the
more succinct private property equivalent of being able to exclude
anyone for any reason, or no reason at all. Building and health codes
empower a legion of substance-eating parasites to invade without
warning and without a warrant, backed by armed force, increasingly
visible on the hip of the invading bureaucrat's hip.

No listing of the fronts on the war against private property would be
complete without a survey of the effects of mis-named environmental
laws, which allow all levels of government to destroy the value of
arbitrarily large or small bits of property by the simple expedient
of declaring that one or more of the species of flora and fauna that
MIGHT be found there are more valuable than outdated notions of human
rights and civil liberties. The enemy forces have overrun the
positions of private landowners to such a degree that the "glancing
goose test" is used to bankrupt and/or imprison those whose property
underlies migratory waterfowl flight paths, lest the protected birds
be deprived of their freedom to land and poop anywhere they please.
Buffer zones with radii of hundreds of yards are routinely used to
destroy the value of swaths that are unlucky enough to be adjacent to
a protected slime mold or vermin. The benefits to the "protected"
species are highly questionable, as the rational landowner will
quickly discover the "three S" tactic of western ranchers: when a
protected species is found anywhere near your land, Shoot, Shovel,
and Shut up. If protection of favored species were the real goal,
appropriate legislation could have allowed private property owners to
profit from the presence of these valuable specimens, but of course
profit is nearly as offensive to government as is liberty.

It's hard to gather the number killed in action, but there is a
steady trickle of reports of those like Carl Drega who are tormented
to the point of "going postal," plus those unfortunates who own land
in or near national parks, where armed agents hike hundreds of yards
past locked gates and "posted, no trespassing signs," storm the home,
shoot the landowner dead, then bankrupt the widow in court. Add in
the ones like "Shrub," the golf course owner imprisoned because he
dared to ask where he should move the trees and
city-government-mandated earthen berms that the owners of the
competing golf course (the city government) found objectionable. POWs
are legion and include not just those in prison for illegal "taking"
of protected non-humans but virtually every owner of real estate in
the nation, plus the millions more who are unable to find affordable
property after exclusionary zoning laws and arbitrary "code"
requirements force the price of property beyond their reach.

Well, I've run out of wars, but surely the readers of TLE can check
or update my facts and point out the ones I've missed.

I have nothing but the highest respect for the men and women who
serve in our armed forces. My admiration is matched only by the
contempt for their elected civilian leaders, who waste the blood and
bodies of these heroes to further personal and petty political
agendas that have no rightful or lawful place in the government of a
free people. If the professionals of the armed forces maintain that
they can fight and win two significant wars simultaneously, I'm
inclined to believe them. The problem is, I count at least a dozen
wars being fought with armed troops numbering in millions and
comparable numbers of POWs, KIA, and casualties. My question is:
Which two shall we fight?